When I shared my excitement about realizing just how well Goop (equal parts by volume of flour, vegetable oil, and shortening mixed together) works to release baked goods from pans in the previous post, some friends on social media were understandably dubious about my claims that it worked better than more traditional grease-and-flour methods.
So to be thorough for my own benefit as well as theirs, yours, and SCIENCE, I decided to rotate my owl do some experimentation using my breakfast muffins which had been previously sticking quite badly to my pan.
In the photo below, from left to right, I did the following more standard methodologies of grease-and-flour: vegetable (sunflower) oil spray plus flour dusted on (the UK does not appear to have flour-in-the-spray available for purchase), shortening wiped generously and then floured, and butter wiped generously and floured.
L-R: vegetable oil and flour, shortening and flour, butter and flour.
I then coated all other cups with Goop. The batch I made for the previous post using a 1/2 cup each of flour, shortening, and oil still has tons left.
I baked my muffins as usual, and here were the results:
The Goop-lined cups are on the top row, the oil, shortening, and butter are on the bottom.
The cups using Goop released their muffins with barely a nudge. Crumbs left behind fell off but are not stuck on.
The vegetable oil spray plus flour was terrible, which I expected since it’s what I’d been doing before I found the Goop. The muffin stuck, had to be carefully chiseled out with a plastic knife, and tore at the bottom as it came out.
The shortening plus flour worked very well, though, pretty much just like the Goop. So if you don’t want to make Goop, use shortening plus a flour dusting.
The butter plus flour was better than the vegetable oil spray but not as good as the shortening or the Goop. The muffin did come out with little left behind, but it took a lot of gentle cajoling with the plastic knife, and it did almost tear in the bottom middle. You can see that it left a thin film stuck there.
So the results are that Goop works better than vegetable oil and flour by a lot, beats butter and flour by a bit, but is tied with shortening and flour.
Use this data as you will. I like Goop because it’s fast and easy once you have a batch in the fridge, saving me precious time to write the next blog post…
Update: Check out Mat Brown’s test of Goop! And friends on G+ keep reporting other successes. Haven’t heard anybody not love it yet!
